


A Self-Inflicted Murder

by Webtrinsic



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Dan is a corpse, Dan-centric, Dead People, Death, Dubious Morality, Guilt, Herbert West Being Creepy, Herbert West is an ass, Introspection, M/M, Manipulative Relationship, Morality, Murderous Thoughts, Not Canon Compliant, Philosophy, Poor Dan, Post-Movie: Bride of Re-Animator (1989), References to Frankenstein, Sad Daniel Cain, Sad Ending, Ship fic if you squint, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 11:47:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25969156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Webtrinsic/pseuds/Webtrinsic
Summary: Herbert gravely misunderstands Dan's reason for killing himself. A decision that affects no one more than Dan himself and he's not happy.
Relationships: Daniel Cain & Herbert West, Daniel Cain/Herbert West, Daniel Cain/Megan Halsey
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	A Self-Inflicted Murder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [musicalenchantment](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicalenchantment/gifts).



> i love these movies (not so much the third one) but hehe i got a shirt for it in the mail and i love it and i love herbert so much!!! poor dan tho cause i realize herbert is a manipulative asshole

Dan briefly wonders if this is what his patients felt like. The ones who flatlined and he refused to stop working on them even after minutes of compressions and mouthfuls of air.

He didn’t know how his body had been preserved, how Herbert managed to bypass muscle atrophy or even his brain function.

Maybe it was just him being foolish. Trying so desperately to hold onto what he’d learned in school before Herbert threw that knowledge and his certainty out the window.

Herbert although a manipulative bastard had never actually lied, his intentions and priorities always at the forefront. Within the first few minutes of them meeting he’d been brutally honest. Death. Death was his area of study, Hill was a plagiarist who didn’t deserve any respect, and most importantly the theory about the average life of the brain after death (six to twelve minutes) was just that, a theory for the uninformed. The uniformed being everyone besides the scientist, leaving Dan as the next in the universe to gain that knowledge as well. 

Words are coming from the shorter man’s mouth, it wobbles in Dan's ears unintelligibly as a pen light is shone in his eyes. A scritching of graphite on paper evidence of hastily written notes being recorded.

Dan doesn’t believe he is alive if not for his consciousness and Herbert’s own voice, a memory or delusion of it because his real voice is spouting off still and it’s nothing he can make out; telling him that he was very much alive and the evidence for that fact is evident in that he wouldn’t be able to question if he was alive or not otherwise.

The man with one foot in the grave and one foot out still feels cold, the sheet modestly draped over him not enough to warm him or even properly save his dignity.

The chill is not the only thing that bothers the doctor, it is the emptiness he’d thought he’d become accustomed to after Meg's death that raps at the door that is his mind. The knocking continuously getting louder as he begins to hyperventilate in turn. His lungs struggling as they’ve been purposefully inflated during his death nap, and now are straining to accommodate his expelling.

Hands are on his shoulders and his head is being pushed down, a frantic and almost scared sounding voice seeping through the midst that is his psyche telling him to take deep breaths.

It is the human contact that shocks him the same way Frankenstein shocked the not-actual-monster. A morbidly ironic but fitting depiction of his plight. Until he realizes unlike the story, he may actually be a monster. 

It could have been his slowly skewing view of the world that bitterly suggested that Herbert was actually being a saint and gifting him with life again. But the once bright and shining part of him wept, this was Herbert’s story, and like Doctor Frankenstein, he could not see nor fathom that the monster was in fact him.

He’s acting, arms aching at his sudden movement as he lifts his head back up and pulls the scientist almost on top of him. The short glasses clad man flails, a yelp escaping his lips and a struggle ensuing. Likely under the belief that the reagent actually hadn’t worked and simply staved off the violent tendencies in his corpse for a few moments and not permanently.

Dan could kill him, could smother him or twist his neck until it crackles and his head falls slackly to the side but he refrains. He doesn’t wish to harm the man even if the man has harmed him because if not for everything, even in death, Dan struggled with life’s meaning and those involved.

He’d killed, not because he wanted to, never because he wanted to. He’d killed to save, to protect. Killed for the man he was hugging because he was all he had left.

Herbert was there, Herbert wanted-no _needed_ him. And it was now being rightfully said, his ears unclogging as the man pressed against his sternum continued his litany after realizing he wasn’t being murdered.

“Yes, I’m here Dan. You’re brilliant, so brilliant. Giving me the motivation I needed to make a working reagent. What an amazing assistant, friend! What an amazing friend you are,” and Dan holds to the word friend because in a way that is what they are even when it’s unlikely and wrong.

Doctor Cain is all too aware of why the man in his arms is shaking yet still making the effort to awkwardly hug back in their sprawled operation table embrace.

It is not the reagent that suddenly urges him to dose the shorter man with the man's normal cc's. Now there is no point to do it anyway, even if it is instinct to help the shaking man inject himself because his trembling fingers couldn’t pierce a vein.

Herbert’s work was done, there was no reason for him to force himself to stay awake. No reason more than his addiction itself, but Herbert has been insistent in the past that he could stop when he wanted. Just this once Dan would do what he wanted and keep him and Herbert from plunging the needle in his arm. A thought he holds to because he’s sure if he had the syringe in hand he'd crash it through the man’s skull in an overdose.

Herbert struggles again with fervor as he realizes Dan is too caught up in holding him to let go and he alone can’t get away for his fix. 

Dan has been dead for a month, Herbert has been awake for an uncounted amount of days, and all at once Dan is reanimated and consciousness slips from the mad scientist. 

* * *

Dan is unable to ignore the fact as he goes from his day to day task that the heart in his chest keeping him alive had been pumped by his friend for a month since his suicide.

Even now that he’s up and it’s gotten back to doing the job itself, it’s the reagent that Herbert made, _that Herbert insists they both did_ , that keeps him going.

Doctor West is in his bed, medical cuffs binding his wrist to the headboard, sweating and delusionally cursing his situation even in his sleep.

Dan the undead looks in the mirror while he wets a towel for the convulsing man’s head. The blood is back in his cheeks and he doesn’t know exactly what he’d looked like when he was dead but oftentimes he imagines it well enough that his reflection looks wan.

Dan's own wrist are barely scarred, the stitching having been carefully done and the reagent doing its job in actually having the skin heal. 

Frankenstein was a genius, an incredible, horrifying genius.

It also helped that when he’d cut it’d been high enough that his sleeves covered it. He could always brush the two little lines off as cooking scars, Meg’s old chef had them too.

Returning to his creator, Dan wiped the sweat off his brow, a lackey to a god.

* * *

Money pools in and their names are put in the history books. Nobel prizes don’t compare to the recognition they receive. The world changes and Dan is still listless. 

There is no reason to return to work because his affinity for stopping death is no longer with him. He has context now, context and more context. More knowledge than any textbook or even library could store.

He is not dead but he is not living either.

They still cohabit the same space, a new house, a custom basement and lab included. He brings no one home because even if he wanted to, it has been brought to the attention of the people that he himself is the walking dead.

It’s a turn off certainly, even for himself, but every blue moon he gets a letter or call and he ignores them. He’d been scared by humanity enough.

A flutter of his crinkled brain ponders if his new home is a prison. If Herbert is a prison. His brain says no because his heart knows it is he who is containing himself.

There is no meaning in a listless life. A listless existence because he can’t call this life. Not as he cleans up less blood spills than he used to and makes dinner for a man who rarely eats it.

He is lonely and empty, heart beating but relentlessly. Meg is not here, her heart already having been sacrificed, and in some way he almost wishes the bride was here.

His psychosis and attachment to her she’d matched. They could have lived even if her skin wasn’t all there and a normal life would never come into view.

Normalcy had long come and gone with West’s appearance. And the man was seemingly already a god, others now thinking it too, he refused to grovel and beg for a playmate because he was incapable of finding someone on his own.

Even if he did Herbert would likely only smile and insist all he needed was right here with him, he was right but he was also so very wrong. 

* * *

The walls are either too properly soundproofed (something Dan had initially been worried about since the memory of wailing corpses and Herbert’s cries for help flashed in his mind) or Herbert’s not listening as he screams himself to sleep at night. 

_Maybe he just doesn’t care_ , a small part of him whispers while another one quickly confirms it as fact.

He is valuable only in company. Company he is unsure his friend even wants anymore. Dan doesn’t question why Herbert’s wants overcome his own anymore, they just did.

Doctor Herbert West no longer holds Megan Halsey’s heart in his hands, yet he’s held Dan’s and he still does. 

It is a mistake to think that maybe his dreams will give him a bit of reprieve from his contradicting existence, and he wonders if those whose lives have been restored feel the same.

No, likely not, he hadn’t been fresh enough even if expertly stored. He had context, he had a month of death under his belt, under his fingernails, and under his head.

He had once been a corpse slowly leaking blood. No heart beating to accelerate the process. In hindsight he should have done something vile enough to mangle his cadaver so it couldn’t be reconstructed. 

He could have bathed in acid or self immolate. Cry in laughter from a seemingly nonexistent afterlife as Herbert stood over his remains with nothing beneficial to gain from it. Nothing to show for the man’s ego would be blatant disrespect. Earlier muttering letting him know Herbert was adamant that modesty was the language of the unloved. 

What was once Daniel Cain seemingly felt to be slipping away, his mind melting into what he really was. A walking cadaver. If he was lacking humanity, Herbert had none at all.

The selflessness he had that often bordered on suicidal had brought him nothing but grief and his own self inflicted murder. 

Dan wanted to be selfish, wanted to be selfish because when he’d thought he’d lost everything he’d been proven wrong. His suffering then was nothing compared to now.

Back when he’d been concerned that others were feeling the same as he, Dan had tried to believe he could potentially be of help. Needing a purpose again because his apparent purpose of being Herbert’s final push had already been achieved. 

“You must go through hell to teach others to fight it,” Some quack at work used to shout through the hospital walls, and Dan knows for once he cannot help others because he cannot help himself.

He wants to die again and he wants it to last. For now he does not attempt to kill himself again with the excuse that he is not alive. Additionally even if he’d already been dead for a month, the afterlife he either didn’t actually experience or didn’t exist frightened him.

Experience had not taught him in this manner and he wasn’t Herbert, he didn’t have the courage to dive deep into the unknown even if for once in his li- _existence_ he didn’t actually care about the inherent risks to his person.

Dan tried to reassure his troubles in the same way he did his old patients on their deathbeds. Corralling souls with wistless woes into the dark for they followed with a saddened yet accepting heart. 

He had sat where they had sat, in a bed of death he’d rose from and they did not. Embalmed in his own skin and body that belonged either to death himself or Herbert West if they were not already one in the same.

The guilt of wanting to harm his only friend in the universe is something he holds to with a disdainful fondness that’d surely be the icing on the cake that would have him sent away forever. Guilt and sorrow may be the only thing human left beside his longing for companionship, assurance, _touch_.

Herbert has not touched him since their pseudo hug beside for a handshake in the view of hundreds of cameras and news reporters. As much as he shouldn’t want his reassurance, it only made sense for it to come from the god that had brought him back to this mortal plane.

He has no will left to survive or prolong his baneful meaningless existence as he trudged down the stairs. Herbert merely lifting a brow, fiddling with something or other before Dan fell to his knees, his head pressed against the side of the man’s hip, and his arms strongly tethering himself to the man’s skinny legs.

The surprised “oh,” doesn’t make him laugh or smile, nor does the uncertain hand that pats his head, but it’s as close to a send off he will get as he moves his arm and pulls the gun off it’s holster (one bolted to the operating table for emergency purposes) and blew out his brains.

**Author's Note:**

> snap: allisonw1122  
> tumblr/twitter: webtrinsic1122  
> insta: webtrinsic


End file.
